


In the dark

by cnaught



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Blind!Roy, Cuddling, Hospital, Post-Promised Day, Present Tense, Royai - Freeform, is this hurt/comfort?, mild depiction of panic attack, physical intimacy that isn't sex, talking about feeeeeeeelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 17:17:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11856120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cnaught/pseuds/cnaught
Summary: Soon after the Promised Day, in the hospital, Roy wakes to a nightmare. Fortunately, he isn't alone.(I know this kind of fic is practically a cliche, sorry not sorry)(also I'm bad at titles :/ )





	In the dark

He wakes in utter darkness. It’s several panicked blinks before he remembers: the darkness is all he can see now.

It’s quiet; his own rough breathing is the only sound as he sits up in bed. He can’t tell what time it is — can’t judge by the sunlight, can’t look at a clock. He doesn’t even know the room he’s in. Are there windows? Where is the door? Are the walls far, across some vast emptiness? Or they could be close around, too close, boxing him in — He swings his arm impulsively, encounters nothing. No prison. Not physically. Just the suffocating dark. Worse than a cell, inescapable. He’s trapped for the rest of his life.

He swears under his breath. _Get a hold of yourself, Mustang._ He knows they were incredibly lucky to have survived that day. They'd slain the monsters, rooted out the corruption. They won. It’s foolish to be preoccupied with his own loss.

A rustle in the darkness; he turns his head uselessly toward the sound. “Lieutenant?” Right. She had insisted they be assigned the same room; she said she’d been away from her assigned duty of watching his back for too long, she wouldn’t tolerate another day of it. No one dared object. His fierce subordinate.

She sounds groggy. “Sir?”

“Sorry, did I wake you?” He feels immediately guilty, stupid and helpless. “I don’t know what time it is.”

Rustling, a creak, like she’s moving in her bed. “It’s early. Hours before dawn, I think. Are you all right, sir?”

He opens his mouth, but the reflexive lie sticks in his throat. “I, ah.” He sounds shaky. He is shaky. God damn it. “It’s … good to hear your voice.”

It’s quiet for a moment, then she says, “Hang on.” Rustles, creaks, sounds of shifting; and then footsteps and a small metallic squeak cross the room to his side. When her hand finds his unbandaged fingers, he clasps it like an anchor to reality, a tiny piece of sensory flotsam in the vast roiling dark.

“Thank you.” His voice still isn’t quite even. “It’s … disorienting, you know. The darkness.”

“I’m sure it is.” She speaks softly. He refuses to hear sorrow or pity in her tone; that would be too much to bear. “Perhaps it would feel more natural if you close your eyes.”

He tries it. Though it’s just as dark, with his eyes closed it’s somehow easier to focus on his own breath and the feel of her grip, and he starts to feel more grounded. “That does help. Thank you, lieutenant.”

“Of course.” The mattress dips; he thinks she’s settled on the edge of the bed.

It’s quiet for a long moment. He moves his thumb across the back of her hand. “I’m sorry I woke you,” he says. “You should be resting. You have your own recovery to think about.” He makes no motion to let her hand go.

She sighs. “You’re right. Move over, will you?”

He feels for the edge of the bed with his free hand, and carefully shifts himself over while she adjusts the pillows behind him. The mattress dips again, tilting his weight subtly inward to where she is now, lying next to him, their bodies in contact practically from knee to shoulder as they huddle together on the small bed. Now he lets her hand go and puts his arm around her, careful of her wounds. Her head is on his shoulder; he feels her breath in his ear.

It feels incredible. He hasn’t been able to hold her, to be close to her like this, since before Bradley put him on notice by taking her hostage. God, he’s missed it. The smell of her hair, the warmth of her; with his eyes closed, he could really imagine that everything is normal, that nothing is wrong.

Almost.

“All right?” he murmurs, tracing her shoulder blade with his thumb. She hums affirmatively; he feels the vibration from her throat as much as hears it. “How are you? Your injuries, I mean.”

She huffs, a little, the only way she’ll indicate that she thinks it’s a stupid question. He smiles to himself. Both of them hate acknowledging weakness. “Still weak and woozy from blood loss,” she says in an easy tone like it’s nothing. Like she wasn’t seconds away from bleeding to death. “And I can’t turn my head very much.” Because of the gash on her throat. She must notice his tension, because she sighs and shifts and lays her hand on his chest. “I’m fine,” she says, smoothing his hospital gown over his sternum, stroking his chest as if she could wipe it all away. “I’m safe. It’s all right.”

He breathes deep, and sighs it out, trying to exhale the awful sight of her bleeding on the ground. No luck; it’s still there in his mind, one of the last things his useless eyes would ever see. He remembers her face in those moments, wide eyed, desperate not for her own sake but to make him see. “You were amazing, you know. Even then, wounded like that, you had more presence of mind than I did.”

“I’m just glad you understood my signal.”

“I suppose we understand each other pretty well by now.”

He thinks he can hear her smile. “I suppose so.”

He unbends his elbow, lets his hand drift down her back, over the blend of scars and tattoos that he knows almost well enough to map, even with the gown covering her. His hand comes to rest near her spine. He still can’t banish that awful, bloody image from his mind. He sighs and strokes her back, feeling her vertebrae through the thin cotton and the subtle whorls of scar on her skin. “There was a moment,” he mutters, his voice as low as though he’s recounting something shameful, “when I thought that they would just kill you. That they would expect me to try human transmutation to bring you back.”

She is still, her hand a slight reassuring pressure on his chest. “That wouldn’t work,” she says. “You know human transmutation can’t work. The Elric brothers proved it.”

“I know,” he says. “But, Riza, in that moment? I don’t know that I would have cared.”

She is silent, then she sighs and reaches across his chest, holding him in a real embrace. “You’re an idiot, colonel.” Her tone is sad, remonstrative.

He tightens his grip for a moment, as if he could press her any closer to him. “I know. Alchemists are terrible creatures.” He turns his head to bury his face in her hair.

They breathe together for a moment. That ugly thought, that brutal choice, seems so distant from the quiet room, the too-small bed, the reassuring solidity of her next to him, safe, breathing, whole.

She sets her chin on his shoulder. “I was afraid too.”

Her voice is very quiet. He wishes, intensely, not for the first or the last time, that he could see her face; as it is, he focuses more intently than he probably ever has in his life on listening to every detail and nuance in her tone.

“When they took you,” she says. “When you vanished, I had no way of knowing. Where you were, what they’d done to you.” Her arm lifts from his chest; careful fingers brush errant hair away from his eyes. “What price you had to pay.” Her hand withdraws from his face, curls on his chest again. She lifts herself up on her elbow, presumably for a clearer view of his face.

“I’m going to tell you something, sir,” she says, her tone just firm enough to indicate real tension, “which might upset you.”

She seems to be waiting. He nods once, a little bewildered. Her fingers are worrying at a wrinkle in the fabric on his chest.

“When I saw you again, when I saw that it had only taken your eyesight, I was relieved.”

From where he is, stuck in eternal and limitless darkness, he doesn’t know how to respond.

“‘Only,’” he says carefully. _‘Relieved,’_ he doesn’t say, because he knows it would come out angry.

“It could have been anything.” Her tone is scrupulously even: not apologetic, not exculpatory. “If you had lost a leg, sir, like Edward, in the time between when you vanished and when I saw you again you would have gone into shock and bled to death.” Blunt, unflinching, sharply analytical. Of course in the face of uncertainty she would have been running scenarios in her head. “It could have been your organs, your bones — something vital. It could have been your mind.” Her fingertips rest on him but lightly, like she is unsure if she should withdraw. When she speaks again her straight-facts, all-business tone is leavened with a note of hesitancy, almost pleading. “Lots of people are blind, sir, and they get by every day. We can adapt. You can live with this.”

The anger has settled — not gone entirely, but no longer at risk of overtaking him. Her last words provoke a burst of unworthy petulance: _can I?_ _That’s easy for you to say._ But he knows that isn’t right, she isn’t speaking lightly.

She’s stood with him for so long. She’s worked tirelessly, fought for him, bled for him. The weight of that loyalty, the weight of his responsibility to her, as well as to all the numberless dead he’s left in his wake — those forces that define his life haven’t lessened a bit just because of his condition. He _will_ live with this. He has to. There is no choice but to keep moving forward.

And… she’s right. The darkness is unfathomable. But it could have been worse.

He could have lost her.

He can feel the tension in her, perched next to him. He sighs and reaches over across his body to take her hand. “I wish it had been a limb,” he grumbles, his injured hand awkwardly coaxing her fingers to tangle together with his. “There’s automail for limbs.”

She breathes out her nerves, and settles again in the crook of his shoulder. “Massive blood loss, sir,” she reminds him. “It’s no picnic. Take it from me.”

He grimaces. “Point taken.” His other hand, which had resumed idly caressing her back, pauses. “You’re all right though?”

He feels her annoyed breath as a little puff of air on the side of his neck. “I’m fine, sir.” He thinks, if he practices, he could learn to hear when she is rolling her eyes at him.

“Good.” He lifts their entwined hands to his lips, kisses her thumb and the heel of her hand.

She shifts against him, nestling her head closer to his ear. “The only thing wrong with me,” she murmurs, “is that my impossibly demanding CO dragged me out of bed at an ungodly hour of the morning. But that isn’t unusual.”

“That guy’s a jerk,” he mutters, smiling against her hand. “You work too hard for him.”

“Hmmm.” She places a kiss precisely in the corner of his jaw.

He hasn’t thought about what sex will be like now that he can’t see. He’s thinking about it now.

… He should stop thinking about it now.

He moves their hands back, loosens his grip. “You should probably be in your own bed,” he says, not without regret, “before a nurse comes in to check on us.”

She _hmm_ s again. Her fingers trace indistinct patterns over his hospital gown. “I’ll go soon,” she says. “Just a little longer.”

He grins in the darkness. For now, in this moment, it’s enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I think I'm fudging canon a bit by having them know what Edward figured out about human transmutation; I don't think he's ever shown talking to anyone besides Izumi & Al about it. Sorry to anyone who found that jarring.


End file.
